October 2016

October 21, 2016

It was always a great idea to animate masterpieces of art. It is only recently that creative animators have begun to do it. There is a full-length animated film based Vincent van Gogh’s works and life which is expected to be released soon. Now I have chanced upon this remarkable piece of creative extension of Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’.

I have always maintained that painters have a powerful cinematic sense; even those who dominated for centuries before the invention of cinema. That is because painting is essentially visual and requires either an innate or acquired understanding of light, colors, balance and framing, qualities necessary for cinema as well.

The great American realist painter Edward Hopper’s (1882-1967) influence on cinema has been well known. There are many others whose preternatural sense of light, colors, balance and framing has had a powerful and lasting impact on cinema. More often than not a masterpiece has all the attributes of an entire story unfolding in a single frame while, sometimes, a single frame can represent what might have been a whole story in the artist’s mind. It is conjectural, of course, but it can still be creatively compelling.

This little gem made by the Romanian animator Sebastian Cosor of the animation studio Safe Frame is an example of that conjectural leap. What has helped this short, apart from its astonishingly good visualization and Pink Floyd’s captivating music, is that Munch himself was known for recording his own state of mind. This is what he said of ‘The Scream’s’ four versions: “The air became like blood – with piercing strands of fire ... I felt a great scream – and I actually heard a great scream.” Even without his globally iconic paintings, those words alone could have prompted a filmmaker to create powerful visuals. Being an extraordinarily gifted artist Munch left for future generations such a stunning collection of paintings of which ‘The Scream’ is only a minor, albeit most popular, piece.

As I said all great pieces of art lend themselves to cinema but perhaps none so much as Van Gogh’s and Munch’s works because of their often visually arresting effect. That Munch led a tormented life with a history of mental illness in the family had a direct impact on his visual conception. Cosor uses animation techniques and music to produce a haunting representation of ‘The Scream.’ I am guessing here but I think Munch would have been thrilled to see this work.

On a separate note, I have written about the Munch-Van Gogh dynamic. I have also attempted to fuse the two masters’ most memorable images in two paintings titled ‘Starry Scream.’

‘Starry Scream—Tribute’ to Van Gogh-Munch by MC (Digital)

‘Starry Scream—Tribute’ to Van Gogh-Munch by MC (Canvas)

‘The Starry Scream’

As great artists Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch are not quite alike in their style but to many they feel alike. It has been pretty common for people to confuse Munch’s masterpiece ‘The Scream’ to be Van Gogh’s work, for instance.

For the purposes of historical convenience Van Gogh and Munch can be very broadly considered contemporaries although the former, born in 1853, was ten years older than the latter. Also, Van Gogh died in 1890, barely 37, when Munch was perhaps still perfecting his style. ‘The Scream’ , not necessarily his finest work albeit his most iconic, was painted in 1893, three years after Van Gogh’s death. There is nothing to suggest that Van Gogh knew of Munch even though the latter was said to be keenly aware of the former and even emulated his style.

Until recently, I thought the Van Gogh-Munch dynamic was just a product of my unnecessarily tangential mind but it seems the dynamic may not be that far-fetched. As recently as between September, 2015, and January, 2016, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam had a joint exhibition featuring the two great masters together. Apparently, an oft-asked question of the museum staff, according to a piece in The New York Times by Nina Siegal, is “Where is The Scream?”

As a rather frenzied practitioner of derivative art myself, I have tried to draw in both of their styles. Yesterday, it struck me that it might be a visually captivating idea to combine ‘The Scream’ with ‘The Starry Night’. The man in ‘The Scream’, screaming silently at what feels to be in the range inaudible to the human ear looks like a character who would easily fit Van Gogh’s creative universe. In fact, every time I have seen ‘The Scream’ I have thought of ‘The Starry Night’. Hence this fusion done yesterday.

The more I look at my version, the more I find it works and becomes weirder to look at. It is almost as if the screaming man is hearing things beyond our immediate celestial neighborhood. This is, of course, my gratuitous and hyper interpretation. Enjoy, nevertheless.

October 20, 2016

Here is a one-off piece of advice to young people who occasionally reach out to me and ask me for tips about journalism and, by extension, about writing.

Don't reach out to me. I have nothing to offer you but sulfurous cynicism. Don't impose your precious optimism on me. I don't need it. I certainly don't want it.

As for writing, just write. There is no mystery to it. I guarantee you that. What I don't guarantee is that a) You can write b) You can write well and c) You will succeed. Writing, writing well and succeeding are three separate silos.

Finally, never, never, start your introduction to me saying ,"I also write in my spare time." If writing is your "spare time" activity, an also-ran, it is not for you.

End of advice.

***

The Field by Mayank Chhaya

With that out of the way let me address the main theme of the day. No, it is not the third and final presidential debate last night. I watched it but I have absolutely nothing to say. It’s not like anyone is waiting in nail-biting anxiety to hear my take on it. In any case all this is minor, trivial stuff; just a sideshow.

My more pressing concern this morning is about how to preserve pastel-based paintings. I remember dear friend, fellow journalist-writer and now full-time painter Prakash Bal Joshi telling me how easy it is to get lost in the world of painting. I now see what he meant. Painting, like I suppose any other creative pursuit, is a great escape from the excruciating, minutia-laden, mundaneness of life. Rather than how to fix America’s democracy under assault from a singularly unedifying individual I am more interested in how to use or not use a fixative on my pastel painting.

Pastel is powdery and prone to smudging if not handled well. Its luster and texture are very different from acrylic or oil. It has that airy-light shine because of the way light reflects off its granular texture. It reminds me of the astonishing powdery substance on butterfly wings.

I am beginning to warm up to pastels mainly because of the hard, tactile grip that the pastel sticks afford unlike brushes which require a considerable amount of soft touch. Of the two pastel works today, the one titled ‘The Field’ is partly that. The top half, the sky, is acrylic and the bottom half is pastel dipped in acrylic wash. Also, it is done on the backside of those “For Rent” plastic signs because I ran out of canvases and money. The other painting titled ‘Munch-tribute’ is fully pastel but treated with some plain water.

Munch-tribute by MC

What I like about painting is that once you get into it, much of the world around you recedes into a blur of irrelevance. This happens even when one writes poetry or a piece of fiction. These are like little wormholes that let you enter parallel realities and forget the drudgeries and melancholies of your own.

October 18, 2016

Nerd humor is a thing here in America but not so much in India. That is why it is heartening to chance upon this video by the Indian comedian Biswa Kalyan Rath where he weaves in the paradoxes of quantum physics with a fair bit of ease.

Having been a nerd before the term probably existed I have always been interested in nerd humor. I have written a few pieces featuring that, including the one where Erwin Schrodinger has been charged with culpable felinicide (not a word but coined here) even though the police have not been able to determine whether the cat was dead or alive. What threw them off was the accused’s oblique suggestion that the cat could be both dead and alive.

Rath’s video is is part of his “Time Travel Cabs” series. What I like about it is that it presumes a certain level of understanding of quantum physics and its intrinsic weirdness. The fact that Rath is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur, helps in his being able to distil physics down to digestible humor.

My childhood friend, physics teacher and fellow physics fanatic Paresh Pandya and I have been lifelong discussants over a vast variety of physics. I also happened to have a background in physics but nowhere close to be of a quality that would have pushed me towards it as a career. The more I understand physics, the less I get it.

Coming back to Rath’s video, what is even more interesting is that he has been able to produce it in Hindi even though physics, especially quantum physics does not lend itself to the language in a way that its everyday users might understand. The idea is simple enough. Rath is a time traveling cab driver in the realm of quantum physics. He manages to incorporate the familiar grouse of cab passengers in India that the cabby is deliberately taking them on a longer, more convoluted route to make an extra buck or two. So he has a passenger complaining that it took her less time going but longer while coming back. Rath’s reply is, “That’s because the universe is expanding.”

Then there is the inevitable one about the passenger asking if the cabby can go any faster and the latter responding that he is already going at the speed of light and any faster would mean an increase in mass and other crazy effects.

Rath might consider adding subtitles in English if he wants to expand its reach beyond the Hindi-speaking world.

In a post on July 17, 2013 I had this exchange between a fictional judge trying Schrodinger’s felinicide case. JS stands for the fictional Judge Volkard Strauss while ES for Erwin Schrodinger.

JS: Let me ask in simple terms. Is the damn cat dead or alive?

ES: If all of the above conditions were met, then it is likely that it died. If not, it is likely it is alive. But we have no way of knowing unless we open the box. So for us, without opening the box the cat is both dead and alive at any given time.

JS: Where is the box and how big is it?

ES: There is no box.

JS: Be that as it may, what poison did you feed your cat?

ES: I did not feed my cat anything because it did not exist.

JS: Then why have you been charged with killing the cat?

ES: It is an imaginary cat inside an imaginary box equipped with an imaginary radioactive substance from which an imaginary atom may or may not decay and the tube may or may not discharge and the hammer may or may not fall and the acid may or may not be released. Hence, the cat, which does not exist, may or may not die. And unless we open the box that also does not exist we may or may not know whether the imaginary cat is dead or alive.

October 17, 2016

I confess to being a Bob Dylan virgin until quite recently. The only song of his that I had heard and liked without knowing that it was his was/has been “Lay lady lay”. I have not heard anything else. I know nothing about his song-writing prowess or his poetic brilliance even today. So it is not for me to judge whether he should have been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. (I like his art much more.)

Those who squabble and quibble over who should receive Nobel Prizes ought to be reminded that it was first funded from a fortune that its eponymous founder Alfred Nobel made by inventing dynamite. He also owned the armaments giant Bofors. In his defense, Nobel did something eminently noble by bequeathing his fortune to create the Nobel Prizes.

After that slight detour into the prize’s history, let me come back to Dylan. His winning the literature Nobel has prompted considerable disquiet among those who find his writing below par when it comes to pure poetry. Since I know only three words from his sizable repertoire—namely “Lay lady lay”—I should refrain from saying anything.

As a poet of erratic merit myself though, I can say something generally about poetry. There is nothing pure about poetry as an art form or a cultural construct. Poetry is known to rise—and I regard myself as en exception here—from swirling emotions about the human condition. When people talk of poetry as pure they probably mean its often rigid poetic structure in terms of poetic meter. That’s another story. The act of poetry itself is rarely, if ever, pure. I call myself an exception not because I feel exceptional but because nothing that I have written has risen from any swirling emotions or angst. It is all mechanical in my case and that probably shows.

Returning to Dylan’s poetry, my exposure to it non-existent even now. I first heard ‘Lay lady lay”, along with the Beatles and Duke Ellington, without knowing anything about them and their cultural significance in 1972/73. It was courtesy of my eldest brother Trilochan who had just returned from America after completing his Master’s in architecture from Harvard and with a course at MIT.

He returned to Ahmedabad with a Sanyo cassette stereo player made. Among the tapes he brought were the Beatles, Duke Ellington apart from Dylan. When I first heard “Lay lady lay” I was 12. The tune has stayed with me ever since but words continue to elude me. I have a strange personal context for this song. I remember we had just got some shorts tailored for my second brother Manoj and I. The tailor had made them too tight. So I once put them on, taking them off was quite a task and required help in pulling them down. Once, while “Lay lady lay” was playing and Trilochan was on his drawing board, I matched the composition with these words “Ley ley ley ley, Mari chaddi kadho rey” (Ley ley ley ley, help pull down my shorts).” Even today when I hum “Lay lady lay” the words are mine. (I warned you about my poetry being mechanical.)

I have read a few pieces for and against the Nobel for Dylan. The most telling for me has been by Guy Dammann in The Spectator. The headline says a lot: “The Nobel Prize for literature, at long last, has been awarded to a complete idiot”. Presuming there is no sarcasm or irony or some subtle hip reverse humor here, I am going with the literal meaning of the headline. It is a very well written piece. For me the operative portion of the piece are these two paragraphs.

“Poems exist to draw our inner gaze. They hold this gaze and direct it either onto a mirror – in which we see images of ourselves and the world around us – or through a window, which allows us to see beyond our world into what is still only becoming a part of it. The task of the poet, in other words, is to teach us to see things, things that are already there, or things that are becoming, and to give these things a weight which resides in the music of the words chosen to point to them. The things poetry helps us to see can’t be seen without the poet’s help, so we must have the words and their music to hand when we look at them.

What, then, does Bob Dylan teach us to see? Dylan, perhaps better than anyone, raises a smudged and shaking mirror to the shallowness and lack of intellectual ambition which have come to stand as our age’s foremost images of excellence. In Dylan’s singer-songwriting we can apprehend with hideous clarity the easy self-satisfaction of the protestor who thinks constructive engagement is for losers and phonies. Above all, Dylan expresses our epoch’s celebration of the protraction of adolescence; a glorified refusal to be understood, because no one understands the real me. So much modern art exists to perpetuate and celebrate our facile self-regard, but Dylan’s music oozes it. Its whole texture is shot through with its insufferable smugness, from its inexplicable contentment with a handful of inanely doodled rhymes and empty riddles, to the performer’s blatant refusal even to sing it properly.”

I am particularly struck by this line, “So much modern art exists to perpetuate and celebrate our facile self-regard, but Dylan’s music oozes it.”

I do not approach any good writing from the standpoint of whether I like or dislike its substance but the effectiveness with which it is constructed. I am a sucker for great lines and quirky combination of words such as “vitriolic schadenfreude” that the writer uses elsewhere in the same piece.

My ever constricting intellect does not clarify whether this piece is a sharp rebuke of Dylan’s poetic merit—although it certainly reads that way—I like the way it is written. I am never looking for any human issues or contentions or controversies or debates or controversies to be resolved by any piece of writing at all. I like what I read, relish it for a bit, might subconsciously retain a line or two and move on.

I have described poetry as an unnecessary art. Let me, in the gloriously self-absorbed tradition of South Asian poets, quote myself. On September 15, 2014, I wrote, “Unlike prose, which is necessarily time-intensive, poetry, unless it is epic, is more often than not instantaneous. That is because it often results from an evanescent inspiration. It has to be captured in that moment otherwise it comes across manufactured or contrived. I have always considered poetry to be, apart from being an unnecessary talent, an affliction. It results from a massive chemical disturbance inside one’s brain. It has to be expressed as soon as it occurs even if it happens to be rough and raw. For accomplished poets, who have been doing it for a long time, it takes birth fully formed and polished.”

The same year on April 20, I said this: “Poetry is an unnecessary talent. Having written it since 13, I think I have earned the right to say this. That said, not all talents should be judged for their worldly utility. The real worth of poetry lies in its inspirational quotient.

I have not done a scientific study to say this but I am fairly certain that great poetry has inspired people to do great things. The poet is necessarily is an inspirer or an illuminator. Poetry is a catalyst. If a single poetic line inspires people with genuine utility-oriented talents to do great things that help humanity at large, then poetry serves its purpose as does the poet. However, it is not the poet’s business to do things. Poets lead a life of conceit where doing worldly/mundane/utilitarian things is anathema.”

October 16, 2016

I woke up this morning with the following fully born and the second one as a singular verse even as there was actually a thunderstorm on. I think it has its moments of cleverness and contrivance. That’s poetry for you. The verse is in my mother tongue Gujarati.

As you can see, the moods are very different. I am fascinated by the fact that such two completely diverse poetic ideas could be born together in REM sleep in two different languages. It ought to say something about me.

October 15, 2016

I was watching a single butterfly yesterday and its utterly unpredictable flight. I am fairly certain butterflies file no flight plans to their version of civil aviation authorities. They just seem to take off and go anywhere and everywhere rather whimsically. There is inherent chaos to their movement although it is possible that their flight follows a certain well-ordered logic that the human mind is not equipped to understand. At least, mine is not.

Imagine the chaos in the world if humans walks the way butterflies fly. If I walk the way a butterfly flies, I would be arrested. I have wondered whether butterflies are an unstable system that become occasionally stable only when they settle on a flower or a blade of grass or my lapel. To extend the theme of yesterday’s post, what’s the point of butterflies? Sure, they are breathtaking to look at, endowed as they are with such spectacular colors and charmingly fitful movements. But what’s the larger point? I can indulge in glib talk but that would not satisfy anyone.

Catching butterflies is perhaps the nearest experience in our classical, macro world to catching a particle in the quantum world. When you let go off a butterfly from the gentle grip between your thumb and index finger, it leaves powdery colorful smudges on your hand. That is perhaps one of the essences of the universe. You feel it for an infinitesimally short moment before it vanishes.

It was after a long time that I stood still and watched a single butter fly do what it does—randomly fly around and settle on places you would not expect. I am sure they are looking for an edifying experience but that is not be found in the cracks of a concrete sidewalk or on a dry leaf. What is remarkable about butterflies is that you may never see the same one again in uncontrolled conditions. Of course, breeding and raising butterflies is quite widespread and those who do that might see the same one again and again because they are in a controlled environment.

I was reading some basic facts about butterflies on the website of the North American Butterfly Association. It says there are 20,000 species of butterflies in the world. “About 725 species have occurred in North American north of Mexico, with about 575 of these occurring regularly in the lower 48 states of the United States, and with about 275 species occurring regularly in Canada. Roughly 2000 species are found in Mexico,” it says. It also explains that typically there are about 100 species of butterflies around one’s home. The one that I saw was perhaps a monarch. That’s the only one I recognize. So let’s go with it. I tried filming it with my phone but the movement was so quirky that I felt motion sickness. That begs the question—do butterflies experience motion sickness?

It is conceivable that within their seemingly chaotic and frenzied movement, there is a certain pattern or regularity that escapes my mind. They must eventually get from point A to point B unless, of course, in their short lifespan of about a month or so what is important is getting somewhere, anywhere really, and not necessarily a specific point. It is possible that within those chaotic movements there are some motions which are periodic. Their primary purpose seems to be to drink flower nectar anyway.

So in summary, you have wings sprinkled with brilliantly colored powdery substance forming breathtaking patterns; you fly around without any apparent flight plan, you drink nectar, sleep on the underside of leaves or between blades of grass and then you perish. Now that’s one great life.

October 14, 2016

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.

--Steven Weinberg

These days I often think about these two remarkable observations by the physicist Steven Weinberg. With so many different findings emerging about the universe generally and our galactic neighborhood and our solar system particularly, the two observations offer the most astute philosophical underpinnings to our quest.

The latest finding to trigger my return to Professor Weinberg is that there are 10 times more galaxies in the universe than what we had so far calculated. In the mid 1990s the Hubble Deep Field survey began to reveal the extent of galaxies in the universe.It was Hubble’s Ultra Deep Field, which could detect very faint galaxies, that revealed that there could be 200 billion galaxies in the universe.

Now a paper to be published in the Astrophysical Journal on the basis of a study led by Christopher Conselice of the University of Nottingham, U.K., says there are ten times more galaxies. That is two trillion. A release announcing the finding says, “Conselice and his team reached this conclusion using deep-space images from Hubble and the already published data from other teams. They painstakingly converted the images into 3-D, in order to make accurate measurements of the number of galaxies at different epochs in the universe's history. In addition, they used new mathematical models, which allowed them to infer the existence of galaxies that the current generation of telescopes cannot observe. This led to the surprising conclusion that in order for the numbers of galaxies we now see and their masses to add up, there must be a further 90 percent of galaxies in the observable universe that are too faint and too far away to be seen with present-day telescopes. These myriad small faint galaxies from the early universe merged over time into the larger galaxies we can now observe.

"It boggles the mind that over 90 percent of the galaxies in the universe have yet to be studied. Who knows what interesting properties we will find when we discover these galaxies with future generations of telescopes? In the near future, the James Webb Space Telescope will be able to study these ultra-faint galaxies," said Conselice.”

That is one aspect of the universe. Then there is the question of dark matter and dark energy. As some of you might know, the visible universe, including the now computed two trillion galaxies, form barely 5% of the universe. The rest is constituted by dark matter and dark energy. That takes the scale even further into the realm of absurdly unfathomable for the human mind. For most of us the scale and distances in our own solar system are mindboggling enough.

Then one comes down to another recent finding about the star called KIC 8462852 located 1500 light years from us in the constellation Cygnus. It’s strange dimming has led to several conjectures, including that there may be an alien megastructure orbiting around it that is causing it. The prospects of a super-advanced alien civilization are irresistible.

Then in our immediate stellar neighborhood, there is Proxima b, an exoplanet 4.3 light years, or 40 trillion kilometres, from Earth – a distance regarded as next door in cosmic terms which is now among the most coveted exoplanets to determine habitability.

One can go on with more detailed and specific findings/theories but you get the drift. I am not even going into the currently popular idea that the entire universe may be just a simulation or a hologram. With that being the case doesn’t the universe seem more pointless as it becomes more revealed? Simultaneously, doesn’t the effort to understand it lift our lives a little above the level of farce? I think the answer to both questions is yes for me.

The universe and everything about it, including Erwin Schrodinger’s exquisitely brilliant Cat and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, have been lifelong preoccupation for me. I am no closer to comprehension now than I was in my pre-teens. It is tempting to conclude that perhaps we are not meant to comprehend it fully or that there is nothing really to comprehend. Or, better still, we comprehend it without realizing it.

Since I mentioned Schrodinger’s Cat let me republish yet again a fictional conversation between Schrodinger and Heisenberg. I wrote that piece on August 30, 2014.

Heisenberg calls Schrodinger

Here is an imaginary phone conversation between Werner Heisenberg (WH) and Erwin Schrodinger (ES) that I have imagined to have taken place in the early 1930s, let’s say 1933. The situation is that the two great physicists were supposed to meet for coffee at a café in Berlin but Heisenberg has been delayed. So he telephones Schrodinger at the café.

A waiter tells Schrodinger that there is a call for him.

ES: Where are you? When are you reaching? I have been waiting for half an hour.

WH: I couldn’t tell you precisely where I am and when I might reach?

ES: I asked where you are and not where particles are.

WH: I am, like we all are, made up of particles. So if we cannot simultaneously tell a particle’s position and momentum with any precision, how am I going to tell you where I am and when I might reach?

ES (Sounding a bit exasperated): Werner, I don’t want to get into the whole physics of particles and position and momentum with you on phone.

WH: Why? Is it because you think I may not understand it? I am the whole physics of particles and position and momentum after all.

ES: That’s funny. So what’s taking you so long?

WH: Oh some problem at home but I thought I should call you to get started on what we planned to discuss while I reach.

ES: And you don’t know when you might reach because…

WH: I know my position. I am at home. But I don’t know about my momentum because it depends.

ES: Depends on what?

WH: It depends on so many variables, including whether there is a parade by those horrible Brown Shirts. We both know there is no predicting their position and momentum. Now that is one tough uncertainty that I oppose based on my principles.

They both laugh.

ES: Tell me anyway how this whole principle of your works. What are you saying really? It makes no sense to me. Are you saying that the act of observation affects a particle such that we cannot determine its position? Are you saying that our act of observation physically affects that particle?

WH: Erwin, Erwin, dear friend, you cannot be that simplistic. You know the so-called observer effect works at the quantum level. I don’t have to tell you that.

ES: Yes, yes but the whole Uncertainty Principle makes no sense to me. It is too clever for its own good.

WH: Says the man who locks up an imaginary cat inside an imaginary box with an imaginary vial of radioactive poison and then says the cat can be both dead and alive? Yeah, what’s with the cat? If it does not exist, why should it be dead or alive?

ES: So are you coming or not?

WH: Yes.

ES: Yes to coming or yes to not?

WH: Think of me as your cat. I may come or not because I may exist or not or both exist and not exist.

October 13, 2016

In my continuing quest to make some money out of non-journalistic pursuits and particularly out of my art, here is one more range of products courtesy of VIDA. It is a new line of pillows along with the already available scarves, pocket squares, sheer wraps and tote bags.

I like all of them but the six here are somewhat quirky. Now if you please go the to link attached to every image and at least consider buying some, that would be great. If you actually buy some, it would be even greater.

October 12, 2016

In the information age, which we are well and truly in the midst of, stardom can strike anyone, anywhere, anytime. Kenneth Bone is discovering it and seems to be basking in it with a measure of self-deprecation.

In case you don’t know who Ken Bone is, he was among the people chosen to attend the second presidential debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. He was the one wearing a striking red Izod cable-knit sweater. I did notice him even before he asked the question and was struck by his demeanor, especially the natural amiability of his face. He seemed charmingly non-combative and proved it by asking the question he did. “What steps your energy policy take to meet our energy needs while at the same time remaining environmentally friendly and minimizing job loss for fossil power plant workers?” Bone asked.

If you go by the kind of broadcast and social media attention that Bone has received in the aftermath of the debate and his question particularly, it seems America has fallen in love with him. Trevor Noah of the Daily Show even described him as “fluffy”, as in wanting to cuddle someone so fluffy. By his own admission, the number of his Twitter followers has gone up from seven, including two of his own grandmother, to several hundreds now. He is even said to have received an offer to star in a porn film, apparently the ultimate seal of celebritydom in America.

One can see the appeal in Bone’s instantly friendly face which contrasted brilliantly against all the biliousness and angry contortions on Trump’s face and occasionally Clinton’s. That partly explains why people felt so immediately drawn to Bone. That also explains why he is an internet star. Perhaps the electorate collectively, fed up up to their skull of the toxic diet served by Trump, wanted a way out and Bone with his sanguine disposition and a sweater to match provided it.

As an undecided voter Bone was an important piece of the demographic that both Trump and Clinton are so assiduously courting. He told Carol Costello on "CNN Newsroom", "I think I might be more undecided than ever. I was leaning very heavily towards Donald Trump but Secretary Clinton impressed me with her composure and with a lot of her answers."

His heavy leaning towards Trump did come to me as a surprise though.

Since Ken Bone is the current internet sensation, I had to write this short post about him if only to draw more readers. Then I thought I might as well paint a little illustration of him. Admittedly, mine is a consciously comic bookish version of him.